Seven years, seven lives changed by Twitter

By Doug Gross, CNN

Updated 3:59 PM ET, Thu March 21, 2013

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Anthony Weiner – Anthony Weiner was a hotshot U.S. congressman from New York until he acknowledged tweeting photos of his, ahem, private parts to a woman who was not his wife. He resigned in disgrace in June 2011.

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Kelly Oxford – Kelly Oxford was an unknown Canadian mom before her witty Twitter musings earned her 450,000 followers, praise from Roger Ebert and an offer to write a TV pilot. Her first book comes out next month.

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Sohaib Athar – Sohaib Athar, a computer consultant from Abbottabad, Pakistan, unknowingly live-tweeted part of the May 2011 U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

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Paraskevi Papachristou – Greek triple jumper Paraskevi Papachristou was banned from the 2012 London Olympics and suspended from her country's Olympic team for an offensive post on Twitter.

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Gilbert Gottfried – Comedian Gilbert Gottfried, perhaps best known for voicing the evil parrot Iago in Disney's "Aladdin," was fired from his job as the voice of the Aflac duck for making jokes on Twitter about the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan.

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Justin Halpern – Justin Halpern parlayed his father's hilariously blunt-spoken take on life into a popular Twitter feed, Sh*t My Dad Says, followed by a book and sitcom of the same name.

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Ashton Kutcher – On April 16, 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher became the first Twitter user to get more than 1 million followers (narrowly beating out CNN's breaking-news account).

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Story highlights

On Twitter's seventh anniversary, a look at seven lives changed by the site

Everyday users have gotten book deals and TV shows due to their tweets

But politicians, entertainers and athletes have fallen after bad Twitter decisions

Twitter started on March 21, 2006, with a test post from founder Jack Dorsey

Twitter turns 7 on Thursday, and in some ways, it's like a lot of 7-year-olds.

The social-media platform can be bratty and combative. Its idea of a good conversation sometimes devolves into short bursts of shouting. It can have the attention span of a gnat, loving a shiny new plaything one day (ooh, Bronx Zoo's Cobra!) and then forsaking it for another without a second thought.

But it can also make you smile with the things it says. It can keep you more aware, and alert, than you've ever been before. And it can make you look at the world around you in a different way.

It's easy to take shots at the microblogging site, which debuted March 21, 2006, when founder Jack Dorsey typed the words "just setting up my twttr." (Creators had considered that abbreviated style for the company's name before settling on the full word.)

Anything with more than 200 million users who send out 400 million posts every day is going to have highs and lows. There are the silly trending hashtags, the badly spelled diatribes and, yes, as the cliched insult goes, even a few people who really do tweet about what they had for breakfast.

In an opinion piece for CNN last year (about another comedy controversy, no less), Gottfried wrote that it's a comedian's job to push boundaries and that Aflac shouldn't have been surprised at the tweets.

"I've been telling jokes like this for a very long time, so the reaction surprised me," he wrote. "It's like eating Corn Flakes every day for years, and then one day you eat Corn Flakes and all hell breaks loose."

More than 450,000 followers later, she can add author and screenwriter to her credits.

Her sardonic humor, with topics ranging from family life ("How do you get a red wine stain off a baby?") to random observations ("That ninja guy in the Black Eyed Peas has probably killed 64 people, right?"), gained her a following that includes Hollywood stars and other notables like talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel (now a friend) and film critic Roger Ebert.

Now she's sold her first screenplay, "Son of a Bitch," to Warner Bros.; her book of essays, "Everything's Perfect When You're a Liar," is set to be released next month; and she's been hired to write a TV pilot.

Two months later, he had millions of followers (the count now sits at 3.1 million) and a book deal with HarperCollins. That book hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and led to a short-lived CBS sitcom, "$#*! My Dad Says," starring William Shatner.

Halpern still tweets out his dad's best moments. His second book, "I Suck at Girls," was published last May.

Sohaib Athar

Athar was a 33-year-old "IT consultant taking a break from the rat race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops," according to his Twitter profile. That spot in the mountains was in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and on May 2, 2011, he tweeted about a curiosity.

All of a sudden, news outlets from around the world were scrambling for interviews with him. His modest 750 Twitter followers ballooned to more than 105,000 (they've since settled back to about 64,000).

He claimed that he was hacked, and at first, some of us believed him. After all, could a U.S. congressman be so clueless?

Turns out ...

In June 2011, then-New York Rep. Weiner resigned after someone used his Twitter account to send suggestive photos to some of his female followers. At first, he lied, saying he'd been hacked. But after a couple of frantic days, Weiner fessed up that he had been having inappropriate online relationships with women he met through social networking sites.

He, perhaps wisely, also quit Twitter for a while. His first post since the scandal was in November, when he tweeted about Hurricane Sandy. The potential New York mayoral candidate's most recent tweet, from February, suggests that he still may not have gotten the hang of the whole Twitter thing.

"Llp@," it reads.

Paraskevi Papachristou

A Greek triple jumper, Papachristou was hours away from realizing her dream of becoming an Olympian. Then, on her way to last year's London Games, she tweeted a joke:

"With so many Africans in Greece, the mosquitoes from the West Nile will at least be eating some homemade food."

Maybe it was supposed to be some kind of play on words. But it was quickly denounced as racially insensitive, or downright racist, by Twitter users.

Greece's Olympic committee condemned the tweet and ruled that she would not be allowed to participate in the games.

For what it's worth, Papachristou's last tweet, from July 25, expressed "heartfelt apologies" for the joke, saying she "could never believe in discrimination between human beings and races."

Ashton Kutcher

Sure, Kutcher was already a TV and movie star when Twitter started up. But he became the first Twitter celebrity after joining in January 2009, when the site was getting ready to make the leap from tech-savvy coffeehouse to household name.

He got tons of publicity for becoming the site's first user with 1 million followers -- a distinction he won after winning a race to seven figures with some news network called CNN. He also became a savvy investor in tech startups.

But perhaps more importantly than sheer numbers -- he's now 23rd on the site's popularity list, with almost 14 million followers -- Kutcher seemed to be the first celebrity who understood the benefits of using Twitter to interact with fans.